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Adam Rose isn't someone you would imagine as having been a policeman. He's copresident of Rose Associates, the real-estate firm that has provided his family with the means to become prominent New York philanthropists—their name adorns the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center, and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

When he was a student at Yale, however, Rose served as an auxiliary trooper with the Connecticut State Police. In 1991, while attending a meeting of gay police officers, he met Peter McQuillan, a sergeant with the New York City Police Department. They've been together ever since.

Today they live on 56 landscaped acres in Westchester County; they also keep a home in New York City (they're currently in the process of moving from one apartment to another). Four years ago, the couple, who are art collectors, began attending Art Basel Miami Beach, the country's most important art event. They fell so deeply in love with Miami Beach that they decided they needed a home there too. "The whole city has a feeling of what I call 'emergence,'" Rose says. "It's unusual, midway through one's life and one's marriage, to go someplace where you feel like you're not only getting a fresh start with each other and with new friends—the place around you is getting a fresh start too."

Despite their passion for gardens—Rose sits on the board of the New York Botanical Garden, McQuillan on its horticultural committee—it became apparent that a house and garden in Miami Beach weren't in the cards, as the couple could only spend so much time away from New York. "Things grow a lot faster down there," Rose says. They settled on the next-best thing: a 19th-floor "house in the sky" with stupendous views and terraces that dwarf the gardens of some New Yorkers.

Rose and McQuillan had worked with Salvatore LaRosa and Ronald Bentley of the architecture and design firm B Five Studio on their Westchester and Manhattan homes. Together they decided to strip the Miami Beach apartment and work from the center out, keeping the furniture low and recessing the lights to emphasize the views. The center became "the womb of the space," says LaRosa, a media room surrounded by wood paneling that sets it off from the white walls and towering windows that define the rest of the residence. "It's where everybody winds up at the end of the evening," Rose adds.

Elsewhere the design emphasizes those floor-to-ceiling windows; the main routes of circulation pass by them. LaRosa matched airy, white textiles with the white walls. "It makes the art pop," he explains. And there's a lot of it to pop. Most of the photographs—images of architecture, the ocean, and beaches by such luminaries as Massimo Vitali and Walter Niedermayr—Rose and McQuillan collected in New York. Sculptures by Lynda Benglis, Joel Shapiro, and Yufu Shohaku came from their trips south to Art Basel. "You've got a tranquil gallery space," LaRosa says, "and, at the same time, all the comforts of a home."

B Five brought a sleek, Northeastern sensibility to a place where design often tends toward the breezy and tropical. LaRosa designed nearly all the furniture—the bed, sofas, chairs, and the snow-white cabinet that holds a gargantuan TV on one side and McQuillan's collection of midcentury ceramics and studio glass on the other. "I tailor the furniture to the space," he explains. "I can control the nuances so that things look original. Adam and Peter are very involved in what you make for them. They're not reticent! But I know what they like—that's what 20 years of working with somebody gives you. You know how big their backs are and which way they like to sit, so you can design to that standard. It's very much couture work."

Working with landscape architect Douglas Reed, LaRosa and Bentley transformed the expansive terraces into aerial gardens. They put furniture on the spots with the best views and plantings on the rest. The terraces face north, east, and south, representing three different microclimates; each space wound up with its own set of the local flora.

Rose and McQuillan's Miami Beach getaway has come to feel so much like a real home that they find themselves spending more and more time in the beachside city. Their philanthropy has gravitated with them: This year they made a substantial gift to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in nearby Coral Gables. "We no longer think of Miami Beach as a seasonal place," Rose says. "Our relationship with it has become much deeper than that."